Karl

Popper_And_Philosophy_of_Education
It is possible to read most of Poppers work as an attempt to extend the
implications of the logic of falsification beyond the realm of science to
provide a general moral theory, the main features of which are as follows:

People should write and speak clearly because by doing so they

make their speech or writing more amenable to criticism and
falsification. The widespread appeal of Poppers work may be due in
part to the lucidity of his writing. He is consistent in making his own
work more amenable to criticism and falsification by speaking and
writing in this way. For example he explains that it is his custom

Whenever I am invited to speak in some place, to develop some

consequences of my views which I expect to be unacceptable to
the particular audience. For I believe that there is only one
excuse for a lecture: to challenge.

Rigour (firmness) is essential. Just as scientists should not

abandon their theories too lightly in the face of an apparently
anomalous observation. Those theories should be held good for
long enough to enable their rigorous testing. So too people
generally should not be too swayed by what might amount to
fashion.

Imagination should be encouraged. It takes an imaginative leap to

produce a theory that will challenge an already embedded theory or
set of theories. It is all too easy not to make the imaginative effort to
challenge that which has become orthodox.
The identification of real human problems provides the spur to
formulate a new theory, not the production of a set of aims. The
important question for Popper is which of the problems that face us is
most in need of solution not what final state ought to be brought
about.
Criticism is essential both to the growth of knowledge and to the
possibility of rationality. Rather than attempting to fend off criticism, a
Popperian encourages criticism in all fields of human endeavour.
Whereas friendship and acceptable human relations are often seen to
be based on an uncritical acceptance of certain norms of behaviour, for
Popper a culture of continuous criticism is to be preferred. Within this

culture, good interpersonal relations are characterised by the

willingness of people to accept that while they make tentative steps
to solve the problems they have, their solutions are always temporary
and guaranteed to be inadequate in the longer term.

Truth for Popper functions as a regulative ideal to guide problem-solving.

We may know that we have advanced when a theory is produced which
accounts for all the explanatory and predictive features of the old theory
and enables us to explain and predict new things. It is mistaken and
harmful to believe that we might ever have the final theory that contains
the truth however. There is something immensely attractive and liberating to
those who can accept it, in the fact that their work is bound to have
shortcomings and that others should be actively encouraged to identify
those shortcomings.
The man who welcomes and acts on criticism will prize it
almost above friendship: the man who fights it out of concern
to maintain his position is clinging to non-growth.
It might appear from the above that Poppers moral theory is exclusively
individualistic. That appearance is wrong because his antidogmatism and
fallibilism at the individual level is applied to the problems of social and
political organisation in his later works which include The Open Society and
Its Enemies (1945), and The Poverty of Historicism (1957).
The first of these is widely believed to offer one of the most trenchant
criticisms of Marxism ever written. It advocates a liberal, piecemeal
approach to social and political change. For Popper it is dangerous to give
social and institutional arrangements some permanence because those
arrangements will always turn out to be inadequate in the longer term. A
kind of institutional and social dynamism is to be preferred over
permanent hierarchies, the members of which may tend to spend more
time preserving their status than solving the problems that they were set
up to solve. In no sphere of human influence should it be imagined that the
final or utopian solution to a problem has been found.
The second attacks the idea that the future is somehow predictable by
studying the past the conspiracy theory of society as Popper (1963:
123) terms it. It should not be imagined that a study of the past will enable
the future to be predicted with any reliable degree of certainty. Nor should
it be believed that there is an overall design to the way things evolve.
Poppers theory of knowledge is coterminous with his theory of evolution.
Problem solving is the primal activity for humans and survival is the first

problem to be solved. The development of language may be regarded as

the result of sophisticated attempts to adjust to the environment. This has
enabled the third word of objective non-physical objects such as the
content of books, works of art, science and literature. Poppers three-world
ontology allows him to link the social with the individual and the cognitive with
the affective. Just as objective progress is made through unpredictable
interactions between the three worlds, so too individuals learn.

A Theory of Learning

Popper explains how an initial problem prompts the formation of a

trial solution which undergoes error elimination before giving rise to a new
problem and so on. This explanation has been developed into a Popperian
theory of learning as if Popper were a progressive who supposed that the
only form of useful learning must start with the persons own authentically
realised problem. (Swann 1998) A conservative interpretation of Poppers
work is possible too however. There is a place for inducting children into a
third world of ideas through what amounts to a kind of uncritical
transmission. The progressive interpretation of his work suggests that
children must be confident to face continual failure in the solution to
problems they actually care about solving. The conservative interpretation
stresses the transmission of objective knowledge including the
appreciation of a common logic between all forms of human enquiry. In all
forms there is an attempt to extend the understanding of experience by the
use of creative imagination subjected to critical control. It turns out that
science merely provides an easily understood example of how this takes
place because of its sharp confrontation with physical reality. In the case
of the arts for example, the confrontation is not so direct.
In all cases experience does not present itself in abstraction from
accumulated ways of making sense of experience. Children learn those
ways essentially through a process of dogmatic initiation into a third
world of objective knowledge which represents the accumulated wisdom
of mankind. This third world is not made up only of scientific knowledge
but of the arts, ethics, so-called practical pursuits and all forms of
practice and institutions that go to make up what might be called a
cultural inheritance. It is not possible and certainly not productive to try to
relearn all of what presently constitutes world three through a process of
individual problem solving. The better the initiation into this world the
more likely it is that the learner will go on to solve interesting problems
for herself. Those solutions might then become in time part of the

constantly evolving world three. The tradition of subjecting new theories

to critical discussion is for Popper an established part of that world that
ought to be communicated to the young along with the moral
requirements that were outlined earlier.
Learning proceeds through a process of bringing the prejudices of the past
to a new situation which presents learners with a problem situation as
those prejudices prove inadequate to understanding and acting in that
situation. It is not just an intellectual response that is called for here but
also an emotional onethe learner has to care about solving the problem
and be prepared to take an imaginative leap in trying to solve it.
Psychologically therefore a Popperian learner has to be not only
imaginative but also robust enough to persevere with a problem in the face
of what might be severe criticism, apparent rejection and failure. The idea
that learners can free themselves from this requirement or that they can
free themselves from the prejudices of the society into which they are
born could not be more wrong for Popper. Learning is not best
characterised as a psychological process in which something goes on in
individual heads as it were. Criticism and the formulation of new theories
are only possible in language which gives theories their objective character. For Popper, the second world of individual minds and their psychology
is irrelevant to both epistemology and the logic of learning. As he puts it in
his autobiography.
It is my opinion that most investigations into the psychology of creative
thought are pretty barren or else more logical than psychological. For
critical thought or error elimination, can be better characterised in logical
terms than in psychological terms... Most (or perhaps all) learning
consists in theory formation: that is, in the formation of expectations. The
formation of a theory or conjecture has always a dogmatic, and often a
critical phase.
... there can be no critical phase without a preceding dogmatic
phase, a phase in which somethingan expectation, a regularity
of behaviouris formed, so that error elimination can begin to
work on it.

Educational Organisation and Research

The logic of falsification may also be used to guide forms of organisation.
A form of organisation may be taken as a theory subject to the test of
experience. Policies, institutions, management structures, different forms
of human association and governance may be subjected to the same logic.

That seems to mean that Popper advocates a kind of permanent revolution

in which the possibility of change is unlimited. To be sure he argues in
favour of the democratic form of life because it is only through such a
form that people have the ability to dismiss governments on a regular
basis. He is less clear about the role of democracy within particular
institutions such as schools and factories however and recognises what might
be called the paradox of democracy. It is only possible to retain the
democratic form of life if certain values such as tolerance are widely held
constant. For example it may be necessary for governments to include
arrangements to isolate those who refuse to tolerate the views of others.
Equally it may be necessary to isolate governments from removal from
office to enable them to have the authority and stability to intervene
effectively.
It is easy to see that there is a parallel between Poppers advice to
scientists to hold on to certain theories in order to test a new theory and
his advice to politicians to establish governments that can hold on to power
long enough to enable intervention on behalf of what is held to be the
common good (Popper 1945: 125). There is a further parallel between
Poppers epistemology and political theory: just as Popper rejects
metaphysical essentialism so too he rejects utopianism. The what is a ...
type of question is as unhelpful as a what state ought to be type of
question. A more useful question is what state is likely to be least harmful
and most easily changed. His anti utopianism in politics matches his
fallibilism in epistemology and leads him to ask not how should we rule or
manage but how can we best avoid misrule, and mismanagement in order
to minimise harm.
His arguments serve as a useful corrective to the idea that policy should
be presented as if it were bound to lead to a particular state of affairs
without ever considering or building into policy the conditions under which
that state of affairs could be recognised. For Popper policy should include
its own means of evaluation by setting out a series of testable propositions
through which the success of policy can be judged. It should be framed in a
tentative way. The perceived need for policy evaluation arises out of a
mistaken empiricist epistemology within which policies are framed as if
they were a kind of worthy intention or design for an ideal state of affairs.
Within this epistemology research is conceived as the attempt to provide
the best means of achieving that state or evaluating the extent to which it
has been achieved. For a Popperian however, it is preferable to think of
policy, theory and practice as embodying different levels of theory conceived
as attempts to solve particular problems that seem in most urgent need of
solution. Research is the attempt to produce those different levels of
theory.

The type of educational research that involves the gathering of large

amounts of data in the hope that inductively some hypothesis will emerge
is therefore challenged by Poppers work. To detect a correlation between
two variables tells us nothing about either causation or whether those
variables will be correlated in the future. It is therefore wrong to assume
that through observation and data-gathering reliable or useful truths can
be produced. Conceptual research in education seems to be encouraged
by Popper however, providing it is based on problems which those
interested in education are trying to solve.
Genuine philosophical problems are always rooted in genuine problems outside
philosophy, and they die if their roots decay.... the purer a philosophical problem
becomes the more liable is its discussion to degenerate into empty verbalism.

Conclusion
It is clear that Poppers philosophy radically challenges much current
educational practice, particularly that which encourages the wilder forms of
progressivism and denigrates traditional teaching. His three world
ontology has curricular implications that have not been fully explored. It is
also clear that his philosophy has important implications for the ways that
educational institutions are organised and the ways that educational
research is carried out. It is perhaps not surprising at a time in which
philosophy of education has drawn upon analytic traditions in many parts
of the world and continental traditions in other parts, that Poppers work
has not featured prominently within it. There are also glaring difficulties with
his three-world ontology and version of pragmatism even though common
sense might seem to support both. Even the logic of falsification upon
which, I have argued, much of Poppers work rests is ambiguous with regard
to the need to decide whether to hold on to theories, produce ad-hoc
modifications of them or to reject them. Logic is insufficient to settle the
decision. A similar criticism may be levelled against his political philosophy
and against the under developed notion of a problem upon which it appears
to rest. Nevertheless his arguments against historicism and utopianism are
regularly cited. The recent resurgence of interest in constructivism
(Bereiter 1994) has also led to educational interest in his work. Moreover
the sheer humanity, lucidity and systematic scope of his work is attractive
to those who value open-mindedness, imagination and a constant
willingness to be corrected.